The Music of the Spheres
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, sequel to Plaguesong. Harry and Draco, newly bonded and able to magically heal, are called on constantly to use their power in the service of the wizarding world. They have to learn to set limits. Threeshot. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** The Music of the Spheres

 **Disclaimer:** J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

 **Pairing:** Established Harry/Draco

 **Rating:** R

 **Warnings:** Angst, minor character deaths

 **Summary:** Surviving the Boneturn Plague may have been the easy part. Now, with the really powerful healing that Harry and Draco can do so highly in demand, they have to learn how to set limits. Sequel to "Plaguesong."

 **Author's Notes:** Written for an anonymous request for a sequel to my Advent fic "Plaguesong," which you should definitely read first. This takes place a few months after it, and responds to the request with Harry and Draco only being able to raise the power every week or so. Sorry, requester, but I wasn't able to come up with a plotline where Harry and Draco would have to choose between healing Hermione and Narcissa.

This will be a three-shot.

 **The Music of the Spheres**

"No more than once a week."

Draco said the words aloud, but he was listening to the humming inside his head, the music that marked Harry's rebellion against things. He wasn't surprised when Harry flexed his fingers open and sang, _But_ , even as he said aloud, "That might be a good idea."

 _You know as well as I do why we have to limit ourselves,_ Draco hummed back, raising the notes that always hung in the back of their heads an octave or two. _We can limit the healing and continue to do some good. Or we can exhaust ourselves trying to heal everything the instant someone asks and_ die. _You know as well as I do how close we came to dying last time._

Harry's mind blared, blazed, and slid sideways into what was more a cacophony than actual music. Draco had to listen hard to pick out the song. _But how can we ask someone with a broken limb to wait a week?_

 _We_ can _ask someone with a broken limb to wait longer than that. That isn't a catastrophe. It isn't a life-threatening injury. In fact, I've just about decided. No more healing broken limbs. The Healers can do it just as well._

Harry looked at him with what someone else might have thought was a bored or disdainful expression, but those people weren't in Harry's head, and couldn't hear every harpstring of anguish sounding down their bond. _It could be a life-threatening injury sometimes._

 _Then we heal the cases that have broken limbs as part of that, but not the ones that are just people wanting to walk faster or play Quidditch faster._

Harry's fingers rapped for a second on the edge of the table, an irritating counterpart to the music of his thoughts. _You don't know it's always and only that._

 _I'm going off their words in the letters. You're willing to think that they're just being modest and afraid to ask for too much, that they have deep reasons,_ Draco added, hearing the discord of Harry's objection before he put it into words. _And I'm willing to trust and believe them. If they really need healing for a different reason, a better reason, then they can write better letters._

Harry got up and walked over to look out the window of the breakfast nook. Draco watched him, enjoying the way that the early sunlight added a faint golden tinge to Harry's hair. It hadn't seemed right to move back into either Harry's house at Godric's Hollow or Malfoy Manor after they had bonded; both places would have bad associations for one of them. And it wasn't possible to live apart anymore. So they had bought a small house near the outskirts of Hogsmeade, and if it wasn't what Draco had grown up with, at least he could approve of the polished wood on the walls and the wide windows placed in some odd but interesting corners of the rooms.

Now, the silence lasted long enough that Draco asked, _This is what you wanted too, isn't it? You wanted some reason to refuse to do some of the healings. You just didn't think you could refuse them and be a "good person."_

Harry turned around and scowled mildly at him. _And sometimes you could stand to be a better person._ Sharp notes sang all around his words, like a hive of disturbed bees.

 _It doesn't change the fact that you were relying on me to set the parameters._ Draco stood up and walked over to him. _And I wouldn't have if I wasn't a "bad person."_

Harry was silent for long enough that Draco thought this was going to turn into an extended argument. He wearily braced himself. He really didn't _want_ it to. But someone had to set limits, and Harry's tendency to listen to sob stories and want to save everyone in the world wasn't going to let _him_ do it.

"You're right," Harry whispered aloud. "I'm sorry."

Draco blinked. Apologies were still rare between them. They could be—pleasant with each other, in that they didn't shout and fling things at one another and hold enormous fights like they had when in Hogwarts, but he still hadn't expected this admission. "Yes?" he asked, and leaned on the windowsill.

"If we spend all our time and magic healing minor injuries, then we won't be able to help if, say, another plague comes along." Harry finally tore his eyes from the view of the garden, which had been a churned field of mud until they brought in a few house-elves, and looked at Draco with a small nod. "You're right."

Draco cocked his head. _And about saying that I have to hold a certain line if we're going to refuse the healings?_

Harry kept his head bowed as he smoothed one hand over the windowsill. _About that, too,_ he said, when Draco had been about to scream in frustration.

 _Good_. Draco reached out and brushed one hand over Harry's arm. It no longer felt as strange to touch him as it once had. They were bonded, and they'd had sex—even if all those times were to raise the power to heal the plague or something else—and it would have been stranger and more stubborn and stupid to be stand-offish. _Read the letters later? Let's go flying now._

Harry's breathing picked up the notes of his mind, which made them deep and contented. He smiled at Draco. _Let's._

* * *

Harry sighed and hung from his broom by one hand for a moment as it lowered to the grass that Kreacher had planted with a single-minded intensity; apparently it was an insult for the grounds of a house where he lived to be covered with mud. That had been a great game. Draco had caught the Snitch, but so what? They hadn't exactly been playing for points.

They did have to set up a few barriers in their minds when they wanted to play, though. Otherwise, they both anticipated each other's moves, and there was no challenge, or too much of a chance that they would crash into each other in midair.

 _Harry._

Harry blinked and looked up. Draco had already landed, which wasn't unusual—he seemed to do most things quicker than Harry—and was leaning against the side of the small shed that held their brooms when they weren't using them. His gaze was fastened on Harry in a way that usually only meant one thing.

 _Who needs healing this time?_ Harry sent his broom into the shed with a flick of his wand and tried to send calm, soothing notes in Draco's direction.

 _No one does,_ Draco said, with peculiar emphasis. _But how much in the mood are you to admit that I'm right?_ His last words were like the blast of a trumpet.

 _I think I can acknowledge it when you are,_ Harry said cautiously.

 _It occurred to me that the only times we've had sex are when we have to raise the power for a healing. How messed-up is that?_

Harry opened his mouth to disagree, and then paused. It was true that they had had sex for the first time to bond and get the necessary magical power of twinned minds to combat the Boneturn Plague. And the second time had been to heal a Wizengamot member on the verge of a fatal heart attack. And the third time had been for a critically ill child in St. Mungo's who wasn't expected to live. But they had to have had sex at least one time without it being for healing, right?

 _No,_ Draco said. _I told you, I'm right._ Now his trumpet-voice was almost a whole brassy orchestra.

Harry scratched the back of his neck and swallowed. There was something else, something red and orange and woodwind-like, starting up in the back of his mind. Anticipation. _It isn't that strange. We only bonded because of necessity. Because they didn't have time to look for people who were more suited to raise the power. I thought—well, I thought that having sex for other reasons than healing wouldn't come up, much_.

Draco took a long, prowling step towards him. _So you're content to be an instrument played by the Ministry for the rest of your life? To have our bond reduced to_ that? _Because I am not_.

Damn it, Harry's breathing was speeding up, and the noise of breathy music kept echoing it. _I wanted—I wanted to, but I thought you wouldn't want to. And it would have sounded strange to bring up._

Draco laughed hard enough that Harry was hearing the noise above the notes that were swelling in his head, the soft, triumphant ones that always reminded Harry of some music he'd heard in Muggle movies. Most of the time, he only heard them right after they'd had sex and healed someone else. _We haven't been communicating with each other well, have we?_

And he stepped up and kissed Harry.

Harry relaxed into the kiss. For once, it was nice not to have to worry about how much power they were raising, or what would happen when they found themselves in the world where magic was music and how they would locate the injury or illness they were trying to cure. He could focus more on the sensations outside his head, too, like Draco's hand raking through his hair and his low, excited murmurs in the back of Harry's mind.

 _Yes, good._

Such intense twinning and twining of their voices was happening now that Harry couldn't tell his words from Draco's. And it honestly didn't seem to matter. He moved towards the house, and Draco moved along with him, hands busy and mouth hot and open, seeking.

Then something slammed into Harry's arm and screeched, and Draco said, "Oh, _sod_ it," and Harry surfaced from the drowning with a blink and a gasp.

An owl was fluttering desperately in front of him, Hermione's owl, distinctively brown with black tips to the feathers. Harry reached for the letter it bore, sighing. Hermione wouldn't owl them unless it was a real emergency, unlike the vast majority of letters they received that wanted healing for non-dangerous illnesses and injuries.

 _I knew you agreed with me._

 _It's good that I have you to protect me from myself,_ Harry said, and rested his hand on Draco's arm for a minute as he opened the letter. He would need the protection and the support if it turned out that Hermione was sick, or Ron. Or, perhaps worse, one of Bill and Fleur's kids.

But Hermione's letter didn't say anything about who it was or what it was. It only said, _Harry, come at once. Leave Draco behind._

Because Harry read it and repeated the words to himself in his head—a habit Draco was always complaining about when Harry read books—the snarl of tangled notes came back to him at once. _Like hell I'm staying here._

"I know," said Harry aloud, needing some distance from what was going to happen when he showed up at Hermione and Ron's house with Draco in tow, and folded the letter. "And she at least could have told me what was going on."

Now, he had to imagine Ginny in a broom accident. George trying to kill himself. Someone falling victim to the Boneturn Plague because he and Draco hadn't completely cured it. He felt his mind vibrating like a plucked string, and Draco reached out and put his mental hand on the string and calmed it down by force.

 _If it was the Boneturn Plague, we would have heard about it before now. And you were there when we destroyed it. You know it_ is _destroyed, not just hiding and waiting to come back._

 _Yeah,_ Harry whispered, and swallowed down his panic.

 _I shall have a word with her about what she puts in future letters._

 _Draco, don't do that,_ Harry said wearily as he pictured the argument that would erupt. _Let's just go._

He Side-Alonged Draco, since he knew the house so much better. Draco was silent mentally, as far as words went, but he never quite put to sleep the background music of his mind, and Harry knew how doubtful and disdainful he was.

Well, as much as Harry loved and trusted Hermione, he had to admit he was feeling somewhat the same. Hermione had been one of the few who had said that they had to be left alone to support their bond and get used to it, not expected to use constant miracles of healing. He wondered why, now, she would try to insist that separating from Draco was so important.

And he hoped that when he found out what Hermione meant, it wasn't something that would cleave him in two.

 _Never, while I am here._

Harry could tell himself all he wanted that Draco was only doing this for his own benefit, that after all, if something bad happened to Harry, it would also happen to the man bonded to him, but it warmed Harry's heart nonetheless.

* * *

"Harry. Thank goodness you're here."

Granger's hug to Potter was brief, but fierce, and she didn't even make as big a deal about his presence as Draco had suspected, beyond a fleeting glance and sigh. She moved back, and they stepped into the drawing room of a house that was smaller and less comfortable than his and Harry's. Draco held back his smugness and took the seat on the couch next to Harry, while Granger whirled around and sealed the Floo connection.

"I want to make sure no one interrupts us," she said, as if that wasn't perfectly obvious, and took the couch across from them.

 _She could at least have her house-elf offer us tea,_ Draco said, not so much because he meant the complaint as because that would distract Harry from his bewildering harmonics of worry over Granger, Weasley, and the rest of the Weasleys.

 _You're insufferable sometimes,_ Harry said, but the chorus of his mind smoothed out and silenced. He nodded to Draco as Granger clasped her hands in front of her and began to talk.

"It's the aftermath of the Boneturn Plague," she said.

"There hasn't been a resurgence of it, has there?" Draco supposed Harry's outer voice might have sounded calm, but his inner one had bounded back up into the harmonics of worry again. Draco took his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze, as well as turning a glare over to Granger. Instead of telling them the truth straightforwardly, she had to drag the revelation out and make it all melodramatic. She could have at least tried to ease Harry's anxiety.

"No," said Granger, and looked startled, as though it had never occurred to her that someone would think that. Which only proved to Draco that he was the only one who really _knew_ Harry.

 _Oh, hush. She had no reason to think I would interpret it that way._

 _My point stands._

Harry grumbled, but he said, "All right. What did you mean, then?"

"It's the grief of the wizarding world," said Granger, and she gave Harry such an earnest look that Draco would have gargled if he'd had the choice. "The sudden death of so many. Did you know there's almost no family in wizarding Britain who hasn't lost someone?"

Draco held back his response, but he did say to Harry, _Who felt the magic of the wizarding world as music? Who knew that the best response was to stop the plague from taking more, instead of dwelling on the grief for the dead?_

 _She's making some sort of point,_ Harry said, although the tones of his mind were bruised in color, and that wasn't a good combination, as far as Draco was concerned. He looked back at Granger and said, quietly, "What are you asking us to do?"

"To heal that grief," said Granger. "To ease it. You can hear the way that the grief is influencing their magic. It ought to be easy."

Draco narrowed his eyes and waited. But Harry didn't tell her to piss off, and while Draco had been fuming from the beginning of Granger's statement—because he and Harry had only ever healed physical ailments, not mental ones—the last sentence pushed him over the edge.

"It ought to be _easy_?" he asked, and laughed. Granger would take everything she needed to from that laugh, if she was smart. And Harry was always telling him how smart she was. She shouldn't need to ask for more.

But Granger narrowed her eyes at him and said, "Compared to healing the plague itself? Of course it should be. You were fighting Voldemort's magic then." Draco hated the fact that the name still made him wince, and Granger smiled as if she thought that meant she'd persuaded him. "Here, you're just fighting a natural process."

"Granger, do you _listen_ to yourself, or is your head too dense to let the words echo?"

 _Draco._

Draco winced as the inside of his head started sounding like a metal pot with a baby banging a spoon on it. _She is sounding stupid,_ he snapped back. _Don't tell me that you're falling for her shit._

 _She's still one of my best friends._ Harry turned to face Granger, although his mind was singing _Hermione_ at Draco strongly enough to make him think of her that way if he'd been in a better mood, and adopted one of those patronizing, soothing tones. "Hermione. Why don't you tell us what you mean? Why do you think we can heal grief and guilt when we've never done it before? That's not easy. What we do is never easy, the way we have to raise the power and then find the injury in the music and sing it better, but grief would be especially hard."

"Because your magic was so powerful." Granger was looking at both of them with an oddly mixed expression, wonder and reproach both at once. "Didn't you know that? I could feel it when it ripped through me and chased away the tendrils of the plague that were starting to curl towards me. Even though I didn't have it," she added, perhaps seeing Draco's skepticism. "I could still feel the change in the magic around me. If you can do that, then healing the grief ought to be a lot easier."

"We'll have to see," Harry began, soothingly.

"No," Draco snapped back. "We don't have to see. We can't do it."

Harry spent a moment breathing, while his mind jangled. Draco turned back to Granger and said, "We nearly killed ourselves trying to heal that case of Potions poisoning in St. Mungo's a week ago. I'd already decided that we needed to restrict our healing. This is just another example of why we need to. Because otherwise, people will expect us to do the bloody _impossible_."

"But why would that exhaust you when healing the plague didn't?" Granger shook her head, the picture of someone who couldn't understand the very basic facts being presented to her. "It must be an odd magical power that can manage a great feat but not a little one."

"Well, _that's_ obvious, though," Harry said, before Draco could respond. "I mean, we were raising the power the first time using a ritual, weren't we? And that ritual added extra power to the bonding and the magic and—" He flushed, but he had committed to this, and apparently he would say it, even in front of his friend. "The sex."

Draco blinked. He hadn't thought of it before, but he had wondered the same thing as Granger, why healing had become so much more exhausting after the ritual. Of course it made sense now. They had done the ritual in a prepared space and at a particular time, and with all the necessary alteration of mind that separated them from the usual, outside world. If they did it that way again, they might produce miracles of healing once more.

Except that Draco—and he flung that thought at Harry, accenting it with screaming violins—didn't _want_ to have a ritual every time someone asked something else of them.

"Then do the ritual again," Granger continued, oblivious.

"We can't do the same one, since we're already bonded." Even Harry sounded a bit irritated now. "And we do have to rest. We can do about one healing a week, no more than that."

"Then you can try a different—"

"No, we can't, Granger," Draco said. "Because I refuse to participate."

Granger looked at him with her lips slightly parted and the silliest look on her face. "Why?"

"Because our bond and our magic and even our sex life has been turned into nothing more than a tool of healing for the wizarding world." Draco stood up, and pulled Harry with him, jerking his arm when he didn't respond. "We haven't had the chance to start exploring how much we matter to each other because of the constant pleading letters. We are _going home_ , and we're going to spend some time having sex because we want to, not because someone is asking us to." Granger's face finally flamed as she caught up. "And I, for one, do not plan to spend the rest of my life being _used_."

"It's helping people, not using you!"

"Right," Draco sneered. "Harry might be used to it. I'm not."

And he tugged Harry out of the house. Harry stumbled along behind him.

But for Draco, the greatest proof was that he could have pulled loose, without trouble, and didn't.

Well, no. Perhaps the _greatest_ proof was the soft, muted tune of green and silver in the back of Harry's mind—one of relief.


	2. Chapter 2

Thank you again for all the reviews!

"You do need to spend more time speaking up for yourself and not expecting me to do all the work," Draco said shortly as he paced into the drawing room. Once again, Harry had taken refuge there after one of Granger's letters, but this one had come when Draco was talking with his mother in the Floo and couldn't immediately read it. Harry had also learned to control the bond a bit better, so Draco didn't hear the echo of every word he was reading the minute he read it.

 _Of course, he would use it to hide things from me right when I don't want him to hide them._

Harry looked up, one hand resting on the parchment. His eyes were just sad, and the hum of his voice was muted as though he had come up with a way to put a barrier on that as well. _I'm sorry. But Hermione's letter made me think a lot, and I didn't think you would want to hear all of it._

Draco shook his head. _Not what I was talking about. What did Granger's letter say?_

Harry looked as if he would have liked to pursue that original conversation, but Draco narrowed his eyes a little, and Harry gave in.

 _She's been besieged by people who want their grief healed, because the plague killed so many Mind-Healers and there's not that many available for the survivors._ Harry's hands turned the parchment he held, gripping and pulling in ways that made Draco fear for the letter. On the other hand, Harry had spent enough time with it to have memorized it by now. _She's working with the public to try and get villages set up so people can move in together and no one has to be alone. You know that_.

 _Yes. Which makes it not the focus of this conversation._

Harry stirred and looked at him. _Hermione wants to heal the hurts of the world._ His voice rebounded and twisted like an echo trapped in a chamber made of silver.

 _And you would want to do the same thing._ Draco didn't have to elaborate. One of the first things he had learned about Harry was Harry's deep desire to heal, to help, and if Draco thought some of its results were unfortunate, well, they wouldn't have the bond if Harry's desire didn't exist.

 _I know. But now that we can heal and we're being begged to do it all the time and it wouldn't be a career I could choose and sometimes leave in hospital…_ Harry's hand clenched on the chair arm. _She did apologize, Draco. She's been trying so hard to think of a solution for this grief that it sort of overcame her normal perceptions. She thinks everyone should think the same way and put healing the grief at the center of their lives. She was so pleased to think we could do something about it. Not for herself, but for them._

Draco snorted, and said nothing. Harry would know well enough from the bruise-colored tones of his mind what Draco thought of _that_. Turning themselves into martyrs was all well and good for Gryffindors; what Draco didn't like was their tendency to demand the same unreasonable sacrifices from everyone else.

 _Those sacrifices are ones you understand, or you wouldn't have agreed to bond with me the way you did._

Draco lifted his eyes to Harry. _We've lived together this long, and you still don't understand. I didn't do that out of some altruistic impulse. I would have died from the Boneturn Plague as easily as anyone else if it had gone on._

Harry hesitated, then smiled thinly. _Yeah, I got that. But you still bonded with me, and you still saved them._

Draco sighed and tried to speak like a trumpet, which was difficult when he wasn't angry. It was more complex, the emotion that filled him, sadness and irritation and the urge to take Harry by the temples and look into his eyes and try to convey something that even the bond couldn't. _Yes. But I think we need to learn_ how _to be extraordinary people._

That at least reached Harry, where a lot of other things Draco had thought of couldn't. Harry settled back, and a thoughtful frown formed on his mouth. He tapped one finger against his lips, looked at Draco, frowned again, looked away, and finally said aloud, "You want to spend more time thinking about our bond and what it means to us instead of using our bond."

Draco could have fainted with relief, but that would have been a bit dramatic. He settled for nodding instead.

Harry sat back in his chair. "Okay. How do you suggest we do that?"

Draco hesitated. Now that they had crossed the gap between their minds that he had thought it would take them ages to cross, he honestly wasn't sure what they should do next. "What do you want to do?" he asked instead.

Harry looked out the window, looked back down at Granger's letter, and then firmed his mouth and stood up, throwing the letter on the low table in front of him. He crossed over to Draco, who blinked a little at the jangling tune coming down the bond. It had sounded like that sometimes when Harry was nervous, but this seemed to, honestly, be a new emotion.

"What about what I was going to do before Hermione's owl interrupted us the other day?" Harry asked. "But with a twist."

Draco lifted his head, feeling throat flush, and knowing what his mind would sound like to Harry. "I didn't know what you wanted to do."

"Oh, but you _guessed_ ," said Harry, and now he seemed delighted, and all the tones and tunes in his mind were turning to the liquid of honeyed gold. He grinned at Draco and slid to his knees. "You _hoped_."

Draco found, despite the intimacy of the bond and the sometimes unwilling sex they'd shared, he had no words at all for what was the loveliness of Harry working on his own, making his own choices. He watched with far more breathless anticipation than he had thought he would have with a regular lover as Harry undid his robes and spent a moment staring at his pants.

"You've seen them before," said Draco, to calm the pounding of dulcimer hammers in the back of his head. Or maybe that was his heart. For all that he knew, they might sound the same at the moment.

"Not like this," said Harry, and grinned at him again. "Or maybe what I should say is, not from this _height_." And he deftly opened Draco's pants and slid his cock out and into his mouth before Draco could say a bloody word about it.

At least Harry choked a little, which meant he had probably learned lessons about what exactly he could stick in his mouth. But from the little taste he'd had of the warmth inside Harry's mouth, Draco couldn't rejoice in the choking. He gave a small sound and thrust his hips forwards.

 _That was a whine,_ Harry told him as he leaned forwards after a cough and started sucking again.

 _It was not. It was more musical than that._

That made Harry laugh, which was an _interesting_ experience, although Draco only enjoyed it until he felt Harry's teeth lightly scrape along him. Then he jumped, and Harry coughed again, and if this had been less than _extremely_ important, Draco would have suggested doing something else right now and trying this later.

 _It's important because you want your dick sucked._

Draco tried to protest, but Harry apparently figured out what he wanted, and what he should do. Maybe some of the agitated jingling in the back of Draco's mind helped with that. Harry relaxed his jaw and sucked him in more deeply, and Draco's body went limp and then tense by turns against the chair with pleasure.

He could feel and hear the way Harry was thinking, the rising music of his concentration, and the way he reached down to touch himself, and the sudden burst of flutes and drums in the back of his consciousness when he figured out that he enjoyed this, and it was all theirs, all their own, nothing to do with rituals and healing and bonds.

 _It does have something to do with bonds,_ Harry sang into the back of his mind, sounding annoyed. _I wouldn't be doing this at all if not for the bond, and—_

Draco groaned and shook his head. Sometimes, peering into each other's minds all the time wasn't a blessing. _Just keep doing what you're doing!_

Mercifully, Harry fell silent except for the faint song that meant he was still conscious. He drew his head back, pushed it down again, and pulled back in a steady rhythm that reminded Draco of the most pleasant parts of their other times in bed. Draco reached down and tangled his fingers with Harry's hair, and Harry didn't resist them, but tilted his head back and pinned some of Draco's fingers to the nape of his neck for a moment before he continued.

The rhythm became a surging, pounding, relentless stream of notes that mingled until Draco was having trouble telling his body from his mind, and his mind from Harry's. And his body from the bond, he thought, as he tensed again and felt it approaching, a rolling crescendo of notes.

 _Harry_.

Harry pulled back and sucked one more time, and Draco came, his long pulsing groans mingling with everything else.

He opened his sticky, clogged-together eyes when he felt he could peer down at Harry and know that Harry was giving him his full attention. But that sight just stirred the wish that he could get hard again at once, because Harry was wanking with his lip caught between his teeth and his eyes half-lidded and Draco's come on his cheek.

 _Maybe later,_ said Harry, and then arched and came into his hand. He sighed and reached out to wipe it on the carpet.

 _You're a wizard,_ Draco snapped. _And one capable of wandless magic when you want to be, at that._

Harry blinked at him, then focused on his hand. A soft shimmer of what appeared to be purple haze opened above his palm, and when it closed down, the wetness had disappeared. Harry shook his head and smiled up at Draco.

 _I do keep forgetting that we can use that._

Draco reached down and hauled him to his feet. _Not surprising, when we keep being told we have to use our magic in one direction only._

Harry sighed. _Hermione apologized for that._

 _I'm not talking about her._ Draco waved his hand at the piles of letters lying in one corner of the drawing room, where they rustled and slid over each other and muttered in what seemed like low voices when a breeze of Harry or Draco's motion disturbed them. _All of these people convinced that their causes are equally as righteous, and they all deserve to be healed more than anyone else._

Harry hesitated instead of arguing back. He wiped his face with the same wandless magic, which Draco inwardly mourned—and which made Harry give him a fleeting smile—before he buttoned himself away again and stood up.

 _It's hard to deal with watching your own sickness or pain,_ said Harry. _Harder when it's the sickness or pain of someone you love. I know you said that you joined in the ritual for less than altruistic reasons. Well, that's sort of it for me, too. I could tell myself the whole wizarding world was dying and how awful that was, but the people I imagined always had my friends' faces. Or the Weasleys' faces._

He turned soberly back to Draco, and the music of his mind was more subdued than Draco had ever heard it. _What do you suggest, besides telling people that we'll only heal once a week? What other measures can we take to help them but also protect ourselves?_

Draco nodded decisively back at him. _Leave it to me._

And even though Harry must have been profoundly curious, and could have pressed against the barriers they were learning to place in the bond so that he could learn Draco's innermost thoughts, he didn't. He just nodded, and retrieved his book, and Draco sat beside him and read some old stories of bonded wizards that had happy endings.

It was a good afternoon.

* * *

"Uh-oh."

Harry looked up sharply. When Draco used those particular words, Harry knew he could anticipate worse consequences than usual.

Draco was staring out the window, and his tense, consuming mind-music, like the score in a Muggle horror film again, let Harry know what was coming their way. It would be a mass delivery of Howlers, which had happened before. Not because people were plotting with each other, but because there were a lot of people who decided all at once that Harry and Draco were being horrible and selfish for not healing them or their loved ones immediately.

Draco met his eyes, then held out one demanding hand. Harry placed his hand in Draco's, frowning a little. Draco had talked about putting up more spells that would defeat Howlers, but he hadn't figured out a way to make sure that legitimate letters didn't get caught in those barriers yet.

 _We can use wandless magic when we want to,_ Draco said. _Aim for the Howlers, not the owls. I don't want to harm the messenger._

Harry felt his eyes widen for a second, before he grinned. Then he turned around and faced the birds, and the hum of magic turned into the sort of breathless harmony that it always did when he and Draco were using wandless magic together, outside the purely ritual magic they used to raise healing power.

For a moment, his mind and Draco's flailed in different directions. Harry had been thinking of a specific spell like _Incendio_ , while Draco was thinking more in terms of a widespread magical fire that didn't belong to any one spell and would consume the Howlers. But in a second, they were in accord, and then the bright silver-brass notes that belonged to Harry's mind curled around the ruby-emerald ones that made up Draco's.

And they were _one_.

Harry gave a gasp in the moments before his thoughts were swallowed and melded. They looked at the Howlers coming closer and closer, and found the music of the magic. Every single Howler was a tense riff, played over and over, like someone untalented plucking one string of an instrument. They reached out and sang the counter to that riff, but not the counter to the music that made up the owls' magic, which was much gentler and diffuse.

The Howlers began to explode into dust and sparks and sharp notes. The owls hooted and broke apart from each other, soaring in crazy circles. They laughed and sang again, and the number of angry riffs grew fewer and fewer, as the destruction spread in a neat way all along the line of the music.

In a few minutes, the Howlers were all gone, and not a single owl had been harmed. The birds circled overhead in confusion. A few perched on the roof and walls of the house; the rest finally turned and flew over the horizon. The confused ones perching on the house also left after a few minutes.

They laughed and gamboled in place for a few minutes, shaking their souls in and out of each other's to hear the way the notes changed. Then they parted and dissolved back into their own bodies, opening their eyes easily.

Harry swallowed. He always forgot how _overwhelming_ an experience that was. And how _fun_ this one had been. Usually, he and Draco used that magic only for some super-serious healing purpose, and that meant they couldn't think much about how fun it was.

This had been.

He turned around and found Draco smiling at him with his eyes shining softly. He reached out one hand. Harry clasped it without even being told to.

 _Being told to? Do I tell you what to do a lot?_

Harry grinned. _What, like ignore my friend's letters and how often we're going to heal and what to do in bed?_

 _You never make any decisions,_ Draco said, and his voice had gone back to the sulky brass tones that Harry was more used to. _I have to tell you what to do because otherwise we would still be sitting there while you debate the pros and cons of various positions two hours later._

 _I knew what I wanted to do yesterday, didn't I?_ Harry asked smugly. The way he had made Draco come apart the minute he took his cock in his mouth was still fresh on Harry's mind.

Draco turned as red as some of the Howlers, and looked away for a minute. Then his mind hummed at Harry, a wealth of tumbling impressions that combined the beds they'd had sex on, and the ritual that had bonded them in the first place, and the last normal healing they had done, and the incredibly complex one that had resulted in the destruction of the Boneturn Plague.

It didn't come out as words. Harry didn't really think it needed to. What mattered was that he heard, and understood, what Draco was saying, even if Draco wouldn't have put into those terms.

 _Yes. You're right. This bond is more than some tool for healing or making the wizarding world feel better, even if it is that, too._ Harry squeezed Draco's hand and went on squeezing it until Draco looked at him, in what seemed to be sheer annoyance. _And I want to learn to set limits the way you do, so you don't always have to do it yourself and feel like the "bad one," and I want to learn how to protect myself so you don't always have to do it._

Draco slowly lifted his head, and a small song of triumph began to sing within his mind, echoing what Harry felt and twining along with it. _We can protect ourselves together. The magic we use together can accomplish amazing things, whether or not we can use it to heal someone at the moment._

 _Exactly,_ Harry said.

Draco must have felt the whole-hearted agreement that Harry wasn't sure he could put into words, either, because he smiled back and leaned in to kiss Harry lightly on the chin. _Good. I'm glad_.

The humming harmonics made "glad" a far more beautiful word than it would have been without the music, and Harry sighed and leaned his head against Draco's. Glad for the bond, for the ritual, for all of it.

Glad for Draco.


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last part of _The Music of the Spheres_. Thanks for reading!

The owl that brought the letter was a plain, nondescript one, Harry thought, a brown barn owl with only the faintest touches of white on its feathers. It took the treats from Harry with a hoot of thanks and sat there, carving off delicate slices with its beak, while Harry opened the letter.

And felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach. He sat there staring at the letter even as he felt the concerned hum mounting in the back of his mind, and knew that Draco was coming downstairs specifically to see what he was upset about.

 _I should calm down,_ Harry thought, and rubbed his scar as he thought. His brain was aching, pressing against his forehead, and he knew that he could do nothing about making this better if he panicked.

But he was still desperately glad to turn around and grab Draco when he came to a halt beside Harry's chair and snapped out, in staccato rhythms of mind-music that echoed the pace of his thoughts, _What's wrong?_

 _The letter says that Lavender Brown tried to kill herself,_ Harry whispered down the bond. _She drank a whole batch of powdered aconite mixed with water. She probably would have died already except she tried to do something to make it more—strong. And now she's lying in St. Mungo's. They don't expect her to live._

Draco was silent next to him for a moment. Then he said, _You know that we can heal the damage to her body. We can't do anything about her mind._

It had been the thing that Harry had been repeating to himself below the surface of his mind-music, but he hadn't known that until Draco brought it up, and he realized Draco was right. He sat back with a gasp and nodded. _All right. I was just thinking—_

 _That Granger was right when she asked us to heal the grief left by the Boneturn Plague?_ Draco huffed and rapped his fingers on Harry's cheek. _Listen. We don't even know that Brown's attempted suicide came out of that. It could have been for some other reason._

 _You're right._ And Harry knew something else, too, something that traveled through his mind in a slow swirl of golden sound. If he went into this healing blaming himself, it would make the magic slower to work. They had proved that with one early healing where the person involved had apparently injured themselves trying to duplicate "Harry Potter moves" on a broom. Harry's guilt had made the song slow and dragging, and it had taken them much longer to adjust the tune their minds were singing to the tune of the victim's magic.

 _You're learning now._ Draco sounded a little surprised. _You didn't need me to correct you when you thought that._

 _I can think of some things on my own,_ said Harry with dignity, and settled back, looking him over. _We haven't done a healing in almost three weeks. Can I write back and say we're going to do this one?_

Draco rolled his eyes. _As though I would deny you permission._

Harry could have said that Draco had denied him permission for other healings, like the one that Hermione had asked them to do, and healing for broken legs. He _could_ have said that, but he didn't.

Because he knew the difference. He had learned it.

As soon as he'd finished the letter and sent it off with the owl, Draco squeezed his hand, and drew him up to the bedroom.

* * *

Draco shrugged his shirt off. He had to admit that, even knowing they were going to heal someone and so they weren't having sex just because they wanted to have sex, a glow of excitement rose in his chest and hunting horn notes swirled in his mind. He turned around and found Harry already naked, on the bed.

Harry smiled at him. _Do you know what I'm thinking?_

 _Of course I do,_ said Draco arrogantly, although Harry had the filmy barrier that he had learned to raise when he was reading hovering between them. _We're bonded._

Harry ignored that, and Draco had to admit that it hadn't been the best insult he'd ever hurled. _I'm thinking that this time, I want you lying on your back and your cock sticking up. I want to sit on top of you._

Draco's mouth watered, and he licked it away, a little embarrassed. Harry was grinning at him anyway, and Draco knew he had felt and heard. He lay back and stroked his own cock, and it was nearly as embarrassing how Draco couldn't take his eyes away from him.

 _You only had to ask,_ Draco croaked, in a clash of notes like hissing violins, and staggered to the bed.

Harry fussily pulled him down so that Draco was lying with his arms dangling off to the sides, and then got next to him. His eyes shone. He used wandless magic to bring up the lube and kept it hovering in the air while he spread it on his fingers. And then he surprised Draco again—although Draco could argue that was only because the barrier was there, and he wasn't used to trying to hear Harry's music with it in the way.

He didn't reach down and smooth his hands over Draco's cock, tug and pull on it, the way Draco was yearning for him to. He reached behind himself and eased his fingers into his hole instead, his eyes fluttering shut exactly once, before he forced them back open and focused on Draco again. His smile was deep and smug.

Draco knew that the notes of his mind had subsided to nothing but a tense, single, plucked note, as though someone had found the inner string of his mind and decided to play it obsessively. He decided that he didn't care.

 _That's new,_ Harry noted cheerfully, and moved over on top of him. Draco was shivering, his neck arching despite himself. He could hear the music that made them up vibrating back and forth between them, and Harry snorted at some difference in the tones that honestly wasn't audible to Draco. He sank back, and Draco was sheathed in him.

He gasped and shut his eyes. Harry didn't insist on his opening them. He began to rock, slowly and steadily.

Draco was usually in control of this. He'd thought he'd want to be, most of the time.

But right now, it was pleasant to feel the rocking on top of him, the difference between the warmth against his thighs and hips and the coolness of the sheets against his neck. He reached up and caressed Harry's hip without opening his eyes.

The notes in his mind leaped about, a skirling frenzy like a flute, and then began to play faster. _At least I have that much effect on you,_ Draco said, pleased that his mental voice was untroubled, even if his lungs were going like drums.

 _You have a lot of effects on me,_ Harry said, and squeezed down with his muscles in a way that made Draco jolt and nearly unseat them. _And one of them is exasperation,_ Harry added, as he readjusted his position and then sank back down, with a slight grunt that made Draco's eyes roll back in his head again.

After that, he lay as still as he could—although when he couldn't, that was Harry's fault, not his—and let Harry make the movements. Harry thrust sharply now and then, paused now and then, and gave another surge that made Draco bite his tongue. He swallowed. The blood in his mouth was as hot at the music throbbing between their minds.

 _But the music doesn't taste like iron,_ Harry pointed out smugly, and Draco slapped him on the hip for the irrelevant remark.

 _Just remember that we're raising this power for a reason._ Normally, Draco wouldn't have been the one to bring it up, but he couldn't let Harry get away with that smugness.

 _I know,_ said Harry, and his voice was a swelling music that made Draco shiver in both awe and humility.

Sometimes he was exasperated with Harry. Sometimes he wondered how in the world Harry had escaped getting taken advantage of by everyone in the world before now, and why he was still alive. He ought to have worn himself out before he ever got to defeat the Dark Lord or be a candidate for defeating the Boneturn Plague, from the simple process of giving everyone what they wanted.

But then Draco saw moments like these, and he knew that behind Harry's heart and mind lay a greatness of soul that the music couldn't swallow, only represent.

The moment came when the movements of their bodies were less important than the songs entwining between them, the frenetic sway of their hips less consuming than the impulse and the urge to jump out together and unite their magic. But Draco still felt the moment of his orgasm as a flare like a falling star, a supremely sweet soaring of notes that went on and on, which was followed a second later by the dying fall of Harry's.

They mingled and matched and spent a moment swirling around each other for the joy of the song, before they rose and expanded and followed the magic into that world which only they, since their joining and bonding in that absurdly powerful ritual, could inhabit.

* * *

It actually didn't take long to locate Lavender Brown's sick magic, long only in the moments when they had to shift through other discordant notes and endure the pain of their screech. But there she was, surrounded by the soft green tinkling bells of Healing magic and the soft moans that the cores of the dying made.

They swirled around her and back and forth, playing the music she made to themselves so they would know both what noise she made and what noise she _should_ make. There were so many braided, tightly coiled wires that it was like delving into the innards of a music box and finding that it played different notes at different layers. They hovered back and forth, uneasy.

They might be able to do this. But they didn't know if they could do it without hurting Lavender.

On the other hand, she was in a lot of pain right now, and even easing it might help. And the Healers did think she would die without outside intervention.

So they sang, back and forth between the two of them, and they decided-agreed that it would be best to help. Although they would heal only the physical damage, not the grief or other mental kind that had made her decide to kill herself. That was a note one of them sounded monotonously until the other agreed.

Then they wrapped Lavender in the proper music, and went about the singing.

It took a long time, more than it had seemed when they healed the Boneturn Plague. Then again, that had been a matter of a great opposition, between the song of Voldemort's magic and the song of everyone else. This was only one small voice in a vast choir, and they had never been familiar with Lavender, to know what she should sound like without concentration.

It was a good thing there were two of them. One of them would sing a note, and the other would play it, and then the first would adjust the echo closer to the real note that formed part of Lavender's magic, and the other would play it back. So, together, they came closer and closer to reality.

But there was something else buried beneath all the music, something that neither of them had considered. They first became aware of it as a ticking noise, like a clock that someone had hit with an elbow and knocked off-balance. Then one of _them_ touched it.

The blare, the clash, sounded like a dozen cymbals dropped on the floor. It ripped apart the fragile song they'd been putting together and blasted them tumbling through the space made by magic and music, the space that so many souls and songs had braided into. Their bond kept them connected and able to turn back over and come back into contact, but it was a near thing.

Unbonded souls might have gone flying through the darkness forever, too shocked by the noise to keep their heads.

Slowly, cautiously, they circled towards Lavender's magic again. Their thoughts bounced back and forth between them, traded so fast that one mind in communion with itself couldn't have been faster.

 _Her grief?_

 _Grief alone doesn't sound like that. This was magical_.

 _Is there a magical reason she could have tried to kill herself? A curse that someone put on her?_

That made the other mind pause, and then they were near the noise again, retreated to a deep, solitary ringing in the middle of Lavender's magical core. They paused, reoriented themselves to the tune they had been singing together, and then dived straight down and grabbed the clang before it could burst out again.

It still managed a shocking sound, like a dropped gong, but they had hold of it now, and they unraveled the power holding it onto Lavender's magical core with a hiss and crackle. Yes, it had been a curse, one that manipulated Lavender's mind in a subtler way than the Imperius Curse. It strengthened every sensation of despair, made small problems seem huge and large problems seem insurmountable. It was something they might never have noticed if they hadn't delved into so many sounding strands of Lavender's magic.

 _Now for it,_ they both said at once, and then they spun in opposite directions, tugging on the wire that made the curse sound that way between them.

It came unstrung with a said little noise like a crack opening in a cymbal, and then dissipated into the darkness between minds. They did a little strut and dance to the victory march of their thoughts, and then they went back to repairing Lavender's magic, healing her as gently as possible.

It was much easier now that they didn't have the curse to work against. Lavender's magical core was singing with them, mounting stronger and stronger as they worked, and then there was a sudden wash of ripple-light over them as the song that was really hers began to sound. They twined and crossed over, and vanished back into their own minds and bodies.

They were tired enough that they only separated physically this time, instead of putting their personalities back in their minds and bodies as usual. They curled up together, and the song became a lullaby quickly enough that it soothed them before they could even object that they should probably stay up and wait for news of what had happened to Lavender.

* * *

"Tell them no." Draco didn't even look up from the porridge he was spooning into his mouth. He frowned as Harry watched and added some more sugar.

Harry rolled his eyes. _You didn't even listen to me read the whole thing._ The letter was from St. Mungo's, and part of it was genuinely news about Lavender, telling them that she was doing better. She had been influenced by the curse, but also grief over friends of hers who had died in the plague. It was when Harry had started reading about that that Draco had made his announcement.

 _I listened to you read enough._ Draco leaned forwards, his eyes and mind-music both glinting. _They're making the same plea Granger did, aren't they?_

 _As a matter of fact, no._

Harry would have gone on, but Draco's mind suffered only a mild skip in the music before it continued. _Then they want us to investigate and find out who cast the curse on Brown. Right?_

Harry blinked. _You're learning to hear past the barrier that I raised after all?_ He didn't really feel violated as far as his privacy went, but it meant he would have to build a stronger barrier.

 _No,_ said Draco, with such deep peace in his voice that Harry found himself smiling. _I only know what the wizarding world thinks is appropriate to ask of the Boy-Who-Lived—and since most of them are under the impression that you're going to be an Auror, it's only natural for them to ask it._

Harry leaned slowly back in his chair. They hadn't really discussed what they were going to do in the long term. Harry had vaguely thought it would continue like this for a year or so, as they got used to their bond and healed people.

But Draco had put a sharp limit on how many people they would heal in a given frame of time, and while Harry had to admit that he would have liked to do more, he understood why. And he couldn't be a Healer for the reasons he had explained to Draco.

 _You're not still considering being an Auror?_

Harry blinked at Draco. _You said I wasn't going to be._

 _Oh,_ I _knew that. I'm just amazed you also knew it._

Harry sighed loudly enough that Draco's music acquired an irritated tone, and then shook his head. _It wouldn't be fair to put your life in danger. You know that—that if one of us dies, the other one is probably going to do it, too._

Draco regarded him evenly. _With enough time to get used to the bond, that probably wouldn't happen. But if you went out and put yourself constantly in danger within the first few years, yes._

Harry nodded. _I don't want to do something that's going to make you anxious, even if I think the Auror training would teach me well enough to defend myself. Besides, there's always going to be extra people who want shots at me so that they can brag they took down the Boy-Who-Lived. I'd already given up on the idea of being an Auror._

Draco was oddly silent. Then he said, with a tentative creeping of notes, _You would do something like that because I wanted you to?_

Harry blinked. _Yes._ And then he smiled. If Draco was the one who was good at setting boundaries and telling Harry when they needed to limit their power of healing so they didn't exhaust themselves, Harry was the one who could baffle Draco sometimes by how much he cared for _him_.

He stood up and came around the table. Draco looked at him with the same odd expression as the oddity of the notes humming in his head, and then looked away again.

That didn't matter. Not a lot did, when they still had the bond connecting them. Harry sat down beside Draco and hugged him, holding him until he felt relaxation sliding across Draco's muscles like hot butter.

 _I don't want to distress you or upset you or hurt you,_ Harry whispered. _Now that I know we're not going to be healing machines and I'm not going to be an Auror, we'll find something to do. Separately or together. I'm not in a hurry_.

And it would be…well, it would be nice not to have to worry about saving people from Dark wizards on a regular basis. Regular magic and diseases were the kinds of enemies he would rather handle.

 _You can admit it to yourself._ Draco sounded dazed. _You don't need me to stand up for you all the time!_

This time, his mind-music sounded like a Muggle film score exactly at the part where the triumphant couple fell into each other's arms. Harry laughed and shifted his grip on Draco so Draco was leaning against his shoulder. _Yeah. I can protect you sometimes. I can show you how I can improve your life, too._

Draco nestled into his shoulder and said nothing for a second. Then he murmured, _And if someone accuses me of taking you away from your rightful career as an Auror?_

 _Then I'll stand up to them, and remind them they were the ones who wanted us to bond so we could defeat the plague in the first place._

Draco's music was warm enough now to feel like a cat purring. _This is going to be a lot better than I thought it was._

 _How so?_

 _Because things won't stay the same._ Draco pulled back to glance at him, and his mind was like the music box that Lavender's magical core had resembled now, continually playing a number of different sprightly tunes. _I thought they might, at bottom. We'd be friends and have sex and sometimes refuse invitations or orders from your friends, but most of the time, it would be the same as it was in Hogwarts._

Harry just nodded. He wanted to say Draco could have told him that, but if Draco had, then Harry would have claimed he was wrong and that things were _already_ different and got huffy, and nothing would have been accomplished.

 _What are you going to do with that letter?_ Draco added, nodding at the one that still lay on the table.

"Send back a polite response saying we're glad Lavender's feeling better," said Harry, picking it up. "And then refuse any invitations to figure out who cast the curse or anything extra."

He smiled at Draco. "You can write it, if you want."

* * *

Draco felt a breathless coiling around his chest and throat that made him swallow. He reached out silently, and Harry clasped his hand.

Harry wasn't just relying on Draco to do the things he didn't like or didn't want to do. He was offering Draco the chance to do things that he would never have trusted him with only a short time ago, because he would have thought Draco was going to "hurt" the people involved.

Draco leaned in and kissed Harry and whispered at the same time, down the bond, _Thanks. I'd like to._

And he would make it polite and faintly threatening and no more than that. Because there was absolutely no sense in destroying Harry's trust in him. He wouldn't sacrifice that for a momentary or temporary pleasure.

They would have the bond, instead, and the pleasure from that was far from temporary. Or even only found in bed.

Harry's eyes and mind were shining at the same time, and he whispered, _So glad to have you._

Draco nodded. He could wish that the Boneturn Plague hadn't happened. He could wish that they weren't thought of primarily as invincible healers, since it meant people would probably be sending them owls—and Howlers—for a long time to come.

But he couldn't wish Harry undone. And the soft, shimmering sound of bells in the back of his head, even more than the words, reassured him that he wasn't the only one who felt that way.

 **The End.**


End file.
